THE REAL THING?


The IPKat is grateful to Ed Meikle of Dickson Dees for tipping him off about this story, covered in Brand Republic. Pepsi is challenging Coca Cola over its plans to launch a new soft drink in the UK. Pepsi argues the name of Ipsei, a grape juice, herbal tea and vitamin drink that Coca Cola already sells in Germany and the Netherlands is confusingly similar to its Pepsi mark. Coca Cola meanwhile is attempting to register Ipsei as a UK trade mark and has asked conducted research on its consumer impact amongst workers at the Royal Court of Justice in London. Ipsei is derive from “ipse”, the Latin for “self”.

The IPKat thinks that at most there’s only weak similarity between the marks here. Only the terminally stupid could be confused by a mark and an anagram of it. Merpel is reminded of one of her favourite trade mark cases, where Pepsi challenged the use of 15939. She also points out that the Royal Courts of Justice is one of the few places in the UK where staff would be familiar with the word “ipse” thanks to “res ipse loquitur”.
Do you want to reuse the IPKat content? Please refer to our Policies section. If you have any queries or requests for permission, please get in touch with the IPKat team.
Print | Share by email
By Anonymous at

Comments

  1. JeremyTuesday, 9 August 2005 at 16:53:00 GMT+1

    I think they speak better Latin than that in the Royal Courts of Justice: the expression is res ipsa loquitur, "res" being feminine.

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousWednesday, 10 August 2005 at 15:26:00 GMT+1

    To be completely pedantic, it is because "res" is both feminine and nominative. "Loquitur" is of course deponent.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

All comments must be moderated by a member of the IPKat team before they appear on the blog. Comments will not be allowed if the contravene the IPKat policy that readers' comments should not be obscene or defamatory; they should not consist of ad hominem attacks on members of the blog team or other comment-posters and they should make a constructive contribution to the discussion of the post on which they purport to comment.

It is also the IPKat policy that comments should not be made completely anonymously, and users should use a consistent name or pseudonym (which should not itself be defamatory or obscene, or that of another real person), either in the "identity" field, or at the beginning of the comment. Current practice is to, however, allow a limited number of comments that contravene this policy, provided that the comment has a high degree of relevance and the comment chain does not become too difficult to follow.

Learn more here: http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/p/want-to-complain.html

← Previous Post Next Post →